Resurrecting An Amiga CD32

As an editor on Amiga magazines in a previous life, this is kind of bittersweet. [RetroManCave] was donated an Amiga CD32 games system, and it is trying to resurrect it. If you’ve not heard of it, the CD32 was a 1993 games console based on the Amiga home computer system. It was the last gasp for Commodore, the beleaguered company behind the Amiga. In this first video of a series, they take the system apart, take you through what’s inside and boot it up. The system boots, but there is some sort of problem with the video sync, and they will be taking a closer look at fixing that next. We have featured a couple of similar projects from [RetroManCave] before, such as their brain transplant on a Big Trak toy and Commodore 64 fix. This video (after the break) is worth a watch if you are curious about old systems like this, want some tips on resurrecting old hardware or just want to shed a tear as your misspent youth is torn apart before your eyes.

14 thoughts on “Resurrecting An Amiga CD32”

Part of what killed CD32 was a legal wrangle with HP (who fabbed much of the AGA chipset for C= ); consequently, it went unreleased in the US at a time when it would’ve been vital to release it here. I mean, sure, it might have bought C= , which was being plundered by Medhi Ali, at most a financial quarter or two but still :(

Pretty sure it was a legal injunction from a patent troll that prevented C= from selling these in North America locking up their invested capital.

It might have gotten them through 1994 though Medhi would have fucked the company anyway. The Amiga was doomed by 1990 as the lack of investment meant anything after was too little too late. I don’t think Jack would have made those mistakes.

IMHO that is where commodore went wrong.
An entire industry surrounding Amigas with hardware doing things that the OEM devices were capable of but not released with.
Kick start switchers.
HD’s hanging off the 68000 in the A500. The clock port in the A1200.
Why of why commodore didn’t “get it”. Tho the engineers probably did and were hamstrung by marketing and sales types like most corporations.
Convincing themselves they can sell shit like the CDTV.

I have one for Amiga gaming on, great thing and I remembered it coming out along with a CDTV which as I used to be into CBM’s back in the day switching from a vic20, to a c64, then onto the amiga starting with a early 1.2 ks a500 onwards, and onto the big box stuff starting with a A2000. Such a shame it sank, the cd32 was groundbreaking and finally there for a home gaming system, but then the whole story of the Amiga once commodore bought it was a great tech spoiled completely by management for almost its entire life. And insane peripheral prices.
The vampire accelerators are available for them I think, but I’ve never really seen the need, unlike my big box amiga’s which benefited hugely. I put one of earok’s x-games-in-one compo cd’s in and left it standard.
Of course now my big box amiga is showing a black screen and wont boot, and I’m resorting to using morphos on a pegasos1 ppc to get my desktop amiga style fix on, but the cd32 is still working happily and fired up occasionally for a spot of nostalgia, albeit getting hard to get spare controllers for nowadays (the price of the honeybee’s is a lot…)

Well actually, I not only have “2 of ‘em + 2x SX-1 + 2xFMV modules”,
but more excitingly, the Commodore CD32 IDE debug board,
and the factory CD drive error rate counter used to test the CD drives.
You could search YT for those terms. Got those both working,
and made videos of them.